If You want To Give Up Booze, Pick The Right Role Model

Stop kidding yourself that there's anything romantic about getting pissed.

February 1993 was the first time I ever ordered a vodka Martini. I remember it specifically because it was my dad’s birthday and I was at a fancy restaurant with my family. Already half pissed, I crept away from the table where we were sat and staggered towards the long bar in a separate room. It was buzzing with fashionable customers, staffed by po-faced wankers and adorned with an array of the most colourful and exotic boozes I had ever seen. I was 17, lank haired, gormless and dressed in an oversized suit I had borrowed from my older brother for the occasion. Bleary eyed and full of pissed-up bravado I shoved my way to the front of the crowd and confidently demanded “A Martini please - one of them with the olive in it.”

The reason I was specific about the olive was because I didn’t want them to think I was after one of the Martini Biancos with lemonade that my mum drank at home on special occasions. I was not well-versed in cocktail menus or flash-bar etiquette. In fact, the only alcohol I had ever ordered was pints of lager in one of the handful of pubs in my area that were willing to serve adolescents in the early 90’s. I was therefore surprised when the moody barman started assembling the drink without asking me for any proof of age.

“Fuck me I’ve pulled it off,” I thought to myself.

“Look at me, ordering Martinis at fancy bars up west! I am so fucking sophisticated and urbane! I bet all the sexy older women in this place fancy the bollocks off me!”

The barman placed the drink in front of me in that silly triangular glass they come in and I blithely told him to stick it on the bill of our table. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see one of my older brothers stood behind me, grinning.

“What’s all this?” he asked.

“I’m just having a drink, aren’t I?” I replied.

“Oh yeah, what drink?”

I hesitated. I stuttered. And then I lied.

“Just…a beer.”

“That’s not a beer is it?” my brother laughed, pointing at the daft concoction sat on the bar in front of me. “That’s a fucking Martini!”

Before I knew what was happening, he was beckoning my other two brothers over to help mock me.

“Come and look at this! Sam has ordered a Martini! With a fucking olive in it!”

The three of them crowded round me, forming a circle and laughing. They prodded and shoved me a bit, then passed the drink around among themselves, pointing their noses in the air and saying things like: ‘Pardon me, may I order one of your finest Martinis please bar person?’ in silly posh voices.

Everyone else at the bar, including the sexy older women I had just moments beforehand been contemplating as possible sexual partners, stopped and looked at me. And they began to laugh. So I did what any other self-respecting 17 year old in an overzied suit who had just been caught by his older siblings ordering a vodka Martini in a fancy bar would do: I shouted “FUCK OFF!” at them and stormed out of the restaurant.

I do not write any of this expecting sympathy.

My brothers were right to bully me that night. And the onlookers were right to laugh. Martinis are stupid drinks: they look daft and they taste disgusting. Even in 1993 they cost about ten quid a pop. Anyone ordering one would look like a bit of a wanker - but a gauche adolescent even more so.

I need hardly tell you why I had ordered it: I had recently watched a James Bond film. In the films, you can easily get wrapped up in Bond’s universe of natty suits, fast cars and dreadful chat up lines as if it’s all real. If you’re an idiot 17 year old you can go as far as to think you could actually live like Bond, even though you have no money or driving license and have only ever fingered two girls.

The closest you can get to tasting even a bit of Bond’s seemingly glamorous (but, let’s be honest, actually fucking stupid) lifestyle is ordering his favourite drink. Booze in Bond films seems so sumptuous, so beautiful, so free of consequence. Bond can drive, fight and fuck like an absolute pro even with a couple of bottles of Smirnoff inside him. And he never gets hangovers or ill-advisedly buys a Big Mac to eat on the way home.

This was the first but not the last case of me trying to take on an aspirational drinking persona.

Throughout my drinking years I tried out dozens of them. When I wasn’t fantasising about being a ritzy cocktail man I was being a hard-bitten whiskey drinker, slumped at a bar with a large Johnny Walker as if I was a just back from saving a village of Mexican peasants from unscrupulous gold prospectors.

A lot of the time I was a lager-smashing, gak-snorting yob, shouting ‘Oi oi!’ at no-one in particular for no discernible reason in public places. Sometimes I was Alf Garnett, nursing a pint of ale in the corner of a quiet pub with a copy of the Evening Standard. As I reached middle aged fatherhood I would sometimes like to play the wine expert, blowing stupid sums of money on bottles of drink I didn’t really understand or particularly like in up-market booze emporiums where I would spend ages talking to the sales person like I was Oz fucking Clarke.

Sometimes I was Jerry out of the Good Life: coming home from a hard day at the office and immediately pouring myself a large glass of something amber and strong, letting out a loud sigh of decompression as the strains of the day melted into boozy oblivion.

But whoever I was trying to be, whatever drink I was drinking and wherever I was doing it, I was still the same pathetic fantasist I had been at that bar in February 1993.

I was still trying to see myself through the prism of something I had digested on TV or in a movie. I was like a twisted, boozehound Mr Ben, trying out different roles, each of them as removed from the reality of my life as the next. All in order to feel comfortable with myself.

There is so much delusion in boozing.

When you’re a kid you think it makes you cool. By the time you’ve grown out of that, you’re semi-hooked on the stuff so you have to create fantasies to justify your drinking. So you create a vision of yourself as a cosy old man drinker or a good times party guy drinker or a mad hooligan drinker or refined wine-shop drinker. But it’s all just booze, served up in different shaped bottles in order to trick you into thinking there’s more to it than getting pissed. Most of it is a marketing scam, invented by people who know all about the little stories we tell ourselves and have clever ways of exploiting them. They create myths around drink: the mysterious cowboy; the saloon bar hard-man; the poncy spy with the Aston Martin and the rampant misogyny issues.

To help me give up boozing I didn’t stop telling myself stories; I just tried to tell better ones.

First, I looked around me to see who I knew that didn’t drink at all. There were three or four blokes, all older than me, that I had socialised with for years who never touched a drop. They were not boring or pious or preachy. They were fun and relaxed and - in every case - pretty successful too. Boozing is often associated with toughness but these teetotallers were some of the toughest blokes I knew. They were fun to be around but rarely lost control. There was something about the fact they didn’t drink that made them seem appealingly confident.

I realised that these were the sort of people I wanted to be like. Meanwhile, I looked at the people who were five, ten or twenty years older than me and still going hard at it - and I felt sick at the thought of turning out like them.

One day I Googled ‘famous people who don’t drink’ and was surprised by some of the names on the list. Many of them were reformed addicts who, more often than not, had seen a huge upturn in their professional and personal fortunes once they knocked the booze on the head. But others were just people who had chosen to never drink in the first place. Prince, my all time favourite musician, was one. Another was Chuck D from Public Enemy, a man I’ve always thought as the coolest person on earth. Chuck D is creative, pioneering, wildly clever, passionate, militant, well dressed and, while not a man of violence, would probably be pretty handy in a tear up if he was forced into a corner. He was not the dweeby, boring, vanilla sort of non-drinker that might have lived inside my younger mind.

I am a white, middle aged dad who lives in leafy South West London and enjoys long walks, scented candles and looking at cats. I will never be Chuck D. But I am happy and comforted to know that we share at least one thing in common: neither of us want to be fucking James Bond.

The Reset Podcast Ep 6 - With Mark Ward

For this week’s podcast I chatted to one of my boyhood heroes: former West Ham winger Mark Ward. After he retired from football Mark fell on bad times, struggling to adapt to life outside of the game. He fell in with the wrong crowd and, in 2005, was sentenced to eight years in jail for drug offences. He spoke really honestly with me about the feelings that consumed him after retirement, the mistakes he made, his time in prison and how he has managed to rebuild his life and his mental health. Give it a listen if you get a sec.

Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times

https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123

@calm 0800 58 58 58

@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138

@ChairtySane 0300 304 7000

https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/

https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/

https://andysmanclub.co.uk/